Have you noticed that many people online would like you to pay them to teach you how to freelance — even though they just started doing it themselves? Yes, it’s spring, and bad freelance advice is in the air.

Maybe it’s because I recently hit 15 years as a freelancer (and about 10 years as a coach), but this is a trend that worries me. If you read a lot of new bloggers’ About pages, they often gush that they’re excited to be starting a freelance business…but 10 minutes later, they switch to teaching you how to do it. Before they really have time to succeed at freelancing.

Do you smell a rat? I do, too.

What raises my hackles here, as an advocate for fair writer treatment and pay, is that I’ve had a chance to check out a lot of the advice offered by newbies — and the quality of it ranges from marginally useful to wretchedly wrong-headed.

Need a shot of freelance writing knowledge to start the New Year off right? I’ve got it for you right here — our annual list of the most popular new posts that went up this year here on Make a Living Writing!

That’s right, the all-time most populars you see over in the sidebar from past years are out of the running for this fresh list.

Winners here must have been published for the first time in 2015.

You, my awesome blog readers, voted for these by coming and reading them.

The posts that got the most traffic clearly had the most compelling topics, and are ranked below in order of the views they got.

These are your picks for the most helpful posts this blog put out in the past year.

Without further ado, here are your picked for 2015’s top 10 best posts:

The site (the new combined brand that’s the result of the oDesk-Elance merger) really is one of the best places to go if you want to be severely underpaid as a freelancer. But it also can be a great location for finding good prospects who are lost and confused in the never-ending search for quality writers — if you know how.

I’ve pulled clients who pay $100 per hour (and up) from this bidding site, and regularly use it to find strong new prospects. That’s despite the fact that I only check in once or twice a week, for a few minutes at a time.

You can find great pay on UpWork, too, by changing the way you approach a few elements of the site. These elements can help you avoid cheapskates and save you the time and frustration that usually goes along with navigating bid sites.